Koos Bosma

Today I heard the very sad news that my VU University colleague Koos Bosma, Professor in Architecture and Heritage Studies, died last night because of complications after a heart attack last Friday. It is so very sudden it is hard to imagine, also because Koos was mailing from his hospital bed and it all seemed that very soon he would be back in shape again. As homage a series of photos of Koos and the various courses we did together.

Latina 2010

First our Romanità master course Koos and I did with then staff member Hans de Valk of the Royal Dutch Institute in Rome in 2010. I have good memories of the mutually complementary skills we offered: media studies, architecture, and history. We combined 1930s architecture at e.g. EUR, the Olympic Stadium and Latina with ancient Rome (the real one at the Forum and the fake one at the Museo della Civiltà Romana) and the then brand new MAXI modern art museum. Koos enjoyed the trip and the field work very much.

MAXI, Rome 2010

Museo della Civiltà Romana, EUR, Rome 2010

Palazzo della Civiltà, EUR Rome 2010

This courses and other courses I did in Rome in 2007-2012 spurred the joint venture of my master course Cinematic City, which I taught with Koos and our endowed professor Bert Hogenkamp. First, in 2012, on the new EYE Filmmuseum in Amsterdam, Amsterdam cinemas and European film museums, thus visiting the Filmmuseum Dusseldorf and of course the new EYE. From 2013, we focused on the representation of Amsterdam in film (fiction/nonfiction), both in the inner city (e.g. Oudezijdskolk, Dam, Groenburgwal, Reguliersbreestraat, Magere Brug) and the outer ring (e.g. Zuid-Oost/ Bijlmer, RAI and Olympic Stadium). Again we had complementary skills to offer: Koos as expert on Amsterdam (which he always expanded with Schiphol, his own research project and ‘love baby’), Bert as our documentary expert and me as the fiction film man. We had a good team and enjoyed the interdisciplinary approach. In 2013 we already experimented with tablets, but as stand alone version. In 2014, thanks to Sylvia Moes (UBVU), KPN and Surfnet, we had a 4G experiment with tablets on loan, which was fascinating, and in 2015 it was again a more modest version, still with iPads on loan. Koos often helped us getting inside various fascinating buildings. such as the Harbour Building, and the Citroën garage next to the Olympic Stadium (which enabled us to look inside the stadium when the management there refused us, despite the VU having an office there). Every year we had good, enthusiast input by Koos during discussions, presentations, and the lecturer’s assessment sessions, the latter often with beer and ‘bitterballen’, as Koos liked to mix work and refreshments. Koos was hesitant about our use of new media in education. Sometimes he was right: experiments in innovation of education sometimes fail, when e.g. sunlight blinds the image of your iPad or when cameras registering students discussions fail to work. Still, he was curious to see how these new things worked. Koos was never afraid of strong opinions, but he also was very open to what students said and took them serious, especially if they proved to be eager to debate with him, or would read texts sharply. Good students gave him a kick. Koos was also a networker, who seemed to know everybody, and gave me valuable advice on research proposals. Lastly, he was a very generous man, who treated colleagues and students out of his own pocket and was always ready to help in whatever way.